


Needle Work

by soft_october



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Trauma, gratuitous use of thread metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:13:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26208478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soft_october/pseuds/soft_october
Summary: There is a man he once was.He can remember him the way one grasps a dream upon the cusp of waking. There, he sees the easy smile upon his face, watches the way his eyes sparkle when he tells a clever tale, traces the firm set of his jaw and the perfect curl of his hair. That man had been able to take his life, all those drab threads from which nothing had been expected, and twist them into something new, something beautiful. He’d embroidered his life the same way that half forgotten woman had transformed thread into birds, and he’d been just as skilled in his occupation as she.He’s dead.for theterror.exe prompt:It is no accident James Fitzjames was reborn clean out of jealousy.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 36
Kudos: 108
Collections: @terror_exe Flash Fest





	Needle Work

**Author's Note:**

> Me, writing something for The Terror that's NOT an AU and has like NO jokes in it?  
> What can I say, I'm trying to branch out.  
> (Still gonna be a happy ending, though.)

There was a woman, once.

She sat outside in a chair on a lawn, shaded from the sun by a tree's broad leaves. He came to her with chubby fingers outstretched, asking to be lifted, wanting to be held. Setting her needle aside, she laughed and cooed nonsense words at him before she placed him in her lap. With her arms around him he felt warm and safe.

“Look,” she said, showing him her needlework. _“Olhas” she might have said, instead. He doesn't remember._

He stuck his thumb in his mouth and watched as she took green thread to the work. With ease which only comes with years of practice she called into being a trio of leaves. She changed the thread - pink, this time, and that thread became a flower, the flower invited a bird magicked up from blue silk, and he looked on in wonder. He giggled, tried to grab at the fabric, at the needle from which the forms sprang. She held the needle with him as he imitated her, clumsy stitches alongside hers, fine and practiced.

There is a man he once was.

He can remember him the way one grasps a dream upon the cusp of waking. There, he sees the easy smile upon his face, watches the way his eyes sparkle when he tells a clever tale, traces the firm set of his jaw and the perfect curl of his hair. That man had been able to take his life, all those drab threads from which nothing had been expected, and twist them into something new, something beautiful. He’d embroidered his life the same way that half forgotten woman had transformed thread into birds, and he’d been just as skilled in his occupation as she.

He’s dead.

James lost that man out there on the ice - left him there like log books or Goldner's tins or the bones of the men he promised to bring home. Sometimes he does not think about him. What is one more dead man among dozens, after all, one more stain on his soul?

Yet tonight there is an invitation sitting heavily upon his dresser. The even spacing of the lines implies a refined crowd, the exacting flourish with which his name is writ indicates its naval origin, and it is in moments like these where he despairs for the loss of the man, of the James Fitzjames who did not return, who was lost to the ice.

Like Erebus.

* * *

They had not been in London two days before James struggled with the tempo society's ceaseless dance. Tea with the Rosses. The four of them. _Francis was there, Francis is always there_. Ann asked him for one of his old stories. He opened his mouth, expecting China and his brush with death. What emerged was blinking, stuttering, apologies, Francis’ hand on the back of his neck, Francis' voice commanding him to breathe. _He obeyed._

That is to say, he needed some practice, in order to tell the stories the way he used to. The four walls of his bedroom have heard enough iterations of those tales to peel the wallpaper and they’re _still_ not quite right when he tries them out in public. He feels the skin of his face stretching oddly when he smiles through them, thinks he can see the eyes of his audience sliding off of him and onto each other, growing wide with alarm. _I thought this was James Fitzjames, the arctic hero!_

 _He's gone._ James wished he could say. _He's gone and gone and I don't know where he is. Look for him out there on the shale. We couldn’t bring him back._

 _Might you_ try _to be him?_ this imaginary crowd would demand. _You were him, once._

 _No, I’m sorry,_ he would to reply. _I don't know how to be myself anymore._

None of this can ever be voiced aloud, of course. He almost told Francis, once, when his former first had been half asleep in an armchair in their sitting room and James had wandered in like a ghost, hair rumpled from another sleepless night.

 _Francis, wake up_ , he could have said, gently shaking his shoulder. _I've lost myself._

 _Where did you last see you,_ Francis might reply with a sleepy smile, trying to calm down his second, and James would say _reflected in your eyes_ because anything else would be a lie and he swore to Francis they were at the end of vanity.

But none of that was possible, not really.

There was no reality in which James Fitzjames is so lucky, where he gets to live _and_ return home _and_ live with Francis _and_ voice his feelings and know them returned. He is well aware of how dearly out of balance the scales of his fortune are. So he remained silent that night, placed a throw over Francis' legs to keep him warm, and completed his imitation of a benevolent specter by gliding out of the room in the direction he had come.

The invitation is edged in blue. It reminds him of the ice, the first time James saw it. Baffin Bay, maybe. That ethereal blue took his breath away, awed him as much as it terrified him.

 _It’s just frozen water!_ he bragged to Barrow and a cabal of others before they left, before Erebus and Terror sailed away from Greenhithe and never returned. _How hard could it be?_

James twists his hair in his hands, runs the tip of his tongue along his teeth, tripping over the false ones. The small shaving mirror he keeps on the desk reveals no glaring defects. There was a time, wasn't there? When he looked at himself and could see something more than flaws? More than old wounds which tried to kill him twice, more than a strange, ill-fitting body stuffed into a uniform he used to wear so well.

It was only yesterday, wasn’t it? When he plucked a grey hair from his brush and almost wept? Yet another way his body was changing, failing him, another way he was less the man than he once was. Oh how he had stared at himself in the mirror, twisting every chestnut curl into its place. He knows he did this. He can feel around the edges of a memory, a trunk in a dark and musty attic.

His hair fell out one dark night in Erebus' Great Cabin, when he tried to curl it.

It had been towards the end, a month, perhaps, before they abandoned the ships. Francis due for a meeting on Erebus. James remembers, remembers the stupid giddy bubble of anticipation as he preened in his cabin, awaiting the man who had been left behind when the drunkard fled the body. Just a few curls, just to feel _normal_ again, to know that there was a future past this one -

He stared at the curl in his hand, heart stuttering, unsure of what to do, all too aware of what it _meant_. He tried to shred it, but the fibers were too stubborn, and eventually he dropped them in a nervous pile in the bin, terrified that Francis would _see_ , would _know_ how weak his second had become, and he could not bear to suffer those castigating looks again, not after two years in the ice, not after his drinking and illness and Carnival and the tentative peace that came after.

He knows now - he _hopes_ , at least - that Francis would never deem him at fault. The Francis who had walked beside him for all those miles until Ross found them, starving and half mad, the man who bandaged his reopened wounds and kept him from shaking to pieces with his shivering in the night and who once picked him up as if he weighed no more than a feather to place him in one of the boats, that man would never curl his lip to see the first gleanings of the rot living within James’ body.

That gaunt facsimile of his own shape, the half-corpse he resembled when Ross reached them, is gone as well. It fled in the light of fresh citrus and meat and what seemed at the time to be two months of sleep entire on board _Enterprise_. Six months after they made port his hair returned with a vengeance, and he allowed it to grow almost unfashionably long. Running his hand through his hair was one of the only ways he could feel distinctly _himself_ , an anchor to the reality of his body. Now, when he was most _unlike_ himself, it went ahead and shot itself through with grey, and that small change had been enough to send the “ _mythic”_ James Fitzjames into quiet hysterics.

It should have been _different_ , when they arrived home. He should have settled back into his old patterns like a hand sliding into a much beloved leather glove.

He did not. He cannot.

They are due at a banquet in two hours time, and James has done little, save for putting on his uniform and sitting down upon the bed. Twisted his hair around his fingers, the curling tongs long abandoned in the back of a drawer somewhere. He tried and tried when they first took rooms, but it never sat right, never looked _perfect_ , and he surrendered.

Perfection had been his _standard_ , before they left. The _minimum_ expected. He doesn’t understand why he cannot meet it now, why his hands shake and his hair is always wrong, why his smile - with all his teeth, both real and fake - is like a grimace carved into a mask. It is not just his appearance. It is his - his capabilities. Francis creeps around the house, just as haunted as he and James can do _nothing_ , cannot reach out his hand to help, cannot soothe his hurt, cannot share his own. _Useless_.

Be everything to everyone, that had been his vow for as long as he could remember. Be everything to everyone so you know you are _someone_. And yet now, with a Sir tacked onto his name and the admiration of all the admiralty and society he feels more a fraud than those first years watching Francis glower at him from Terror. At least then he could be of some use, spin a story, set the whole of a dinner table _almost the whole table_ to laughter as they dined on canned meat that was slowly filling them with poison.

He never shrunk before a challenge, and in his imagination he sees how he _wants_ to settle his current predicament. He sees himself standing at attention, shoulders back, eyes glinting with vanity and pride. _That_ man would proudly toss his head, declare it couldn’t be quite such a mess as he was making it out to be, and sort himself out _or at least pretend_ and do it all out of nothing more than a desperate need to be seen, to be loved.

A party? A gathering of men in uniform? This should be nothing at all! A perfect opportunity to be seen, to be admired, to be -

“James?” Francis calls from the hall.

_To be loved._

“I’ll be along in a moment!” He arranges his face carefully, carefully, muscles remembering their place like soldiers falling into formation. This evening will not be so dire; Francis will be there, and James knows he is being hideously maudlin. He will tell an old story, add some gold around the edges, twirl the threads of the tale into a picture guaranteed to thrill his audience. He has done it before, countless times. _This will be no different. Do not make it any different._

He is a performer, after all. Always has been. Playing James Fitzjames is his greatest role yet.

And the show must go on.

* * *

James Ross is here.

James should have _known_ Sir James Ross would be here.

Ross’ hair gleams in the light of the lamps, compliments the gold of his epaulettes, the medals pinned to his chest. He smiles easily, freely, when he spots Francis and James, extends his hand to greet them, makes an offhanded quip about the briskness of the September air that sets the group of polar veterans around them to a bout of hearty chuckling.

None of this should not bother James. He should be able to screw his smile to the sticking place and hold out his hand to a fellow veteran of the polar expeditions without feeling his soul being sucked out through the contact. But looking at Sir James Ross is like staring into a mirror of the man he could have been, _should have been_ and he finds bile in the back of his throat as he swallows back the jealous snarl threatening to shove past his lips.

“Indeed Sir James, Captain Crozier bullied me into my greatcoat, lest the wind should give me a chill.” A low rumble of laughter in praise of his response to Sir James’ jest. There. He’s done it, won them over with his opener. He can last the evening like this, playing off the words of others. A glass of punch is pressed into his hand and he drinks it down perhaps too quickly.

Hand clutched around the empty glass, James lasts less than a half hour before he can feel the man beside him _Francis_ tense in anticipation of a question. He can prepare his response before Francis asks him -

“Are you alright, James?” Francis asks at his elbow. James smiles and laughs, says something about the press of the room and the state of the punch. Francis does not remark on the lateness of the season, nor the expanse of the chamber. He pats James on the arm indulgently, bows his head in assent when James apologizes and steps away. The punch bowl draws James onward, but there had been a similar incident not a month past which ended in the embarrassment of Francis having to tend to him as he retched and moaned about the house with the most dreadful hangover he had ever suffered, Francis bringing him water and tucking the blankets around him had been too close to the walk for comfort, and he had no desire to repeat the experience. Instead, the open door welcomes him into an overworked garden and the breath of crisp September air, and despite the mismatched architecture and dubiously paired bursts of color, James feels like he can breathe. The ugly feelings _envy resentment jealousy_ which have no place in an upstanding English gentleman recede like the tide, though there is nothing along the shore now but emptiness in all directions.

To occupy himself he takes a few turns about the garden, catches little snippets of conversations being carried out, hears about one commander’s drinking problem, a lieutenant’s hope of promotion. He can see himself, before Erebus, before any of it, occupied with similar gossips and hopes. So frivolous now, and yet he cannot help but yearn for the time when he had no more cares in his head than they, when he was a pretty bauble in the crown of the Admiralty, happy to be placed on display.

Of course he casually catches glimpses of Francis at the window. How can he help it, when with every rotation his feet make back towards the house the golden light from the windows draws James’ eye like the beacon of a lighthouse in the throes of a storm? Francis remains where James left _abandoned_ him. He never strays far from Ross, and though he does not offer to take lead in the conversation around them, he seems at ease to follow along, smile, laugh when it is appropriate. There must be a strange noise from somewhere in the room. Francis often looks over his shoulder, searching for something. James wonders what it is.

Upon completion of his third lap in the courtyard he feels fit enough to go inside, but not before yet another study of the ill situated landscaping. Perhaps he missed some crucial element, and it would all fall into place if he could only approach it from another angle.

“There you are,” Francis’ grateful exhale echoes over his right shoulder. James does not turn around, not yet. “I feared you must have placed a foot wrong in the garden and found yourself terribly lost.”

“Led astray by the bold choice to pair doric columns with ogee arches, perhaps,” James replies, the ache in his shoulders easing with each word he can say to Francis in private. “But no, not lost.” Francis chuckles, and James finds a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as well, only to shrivel up in mortification the moment Francis tells him -

“I’ve called our carriage.” James is helpless. He is helpless and useless and Francis _knows_ it, can barely stand to be out in public with him for longer than a few hours.

“No - Francis, we need not - not on _my_ account -” James attempts to protest, but Francis shakes his head.

“Don’t be ridiculous, my head is aching like you’ve driven one of your wretched rockets through it and I'll be happy to be free of admiralty bickering.”

 _It’s because I kept you up last night with my pacing_ , James does not say, although it is the truth.

“As long as you’re sure,” James replies. “I would hate to deprive you of Sir James’ company.”

“James knows perfectly well where I live, as do I him. We’re not some blushing maid and her suitor who must only conduct themselves with an audience of chaperones.”

“Though you would make a charming suitor,” James says, before he can stop himself. The words spin out into the word, careening, poised to hurt because _he was a suitor he was and it didn’t_ \- But Francis only laughs again.

“A suitor perhaps, but I should doubt that anyone has ever called me _charming_ ,” Francis replies, when he has quite recovered.

“Perhaps they should start,” James covers his sincerity with a smile, offers Francis his arm. It’s a game, it's a game, and he can have this, the facsimile of intimacy. “Or should you play the role of the blushing maid? I would have to play the charming suitor, of course, and must then escort you home at once.”

“Oh must you?” Francis arcs an eyebrow at him.

“There are far too many lecherous sailors here,” James continues. “You know what they say about Navy men.”

“Christ, James,” Francis mutters with a scowl that can barely hold itself together before giving way to an exasperated smile. He takes James’ arm anyway, just for the first few steps.

* * *

“You did not seem yourself tonight,” Francis comments, once they are again safely ensconced in the fortress of their shared home.

“Oh?” James wonders, playing the innocent, intimating that he did not catch Francis’ pointed glances during their journey home. “I slept poorly last night, as I’m sure you well know. I shouldn’t wonder if it seeped into my enjoyment of the evening.” He sees Francis mull over his excuse, swirling it about in his mouth the way he used to with a fine wine, identifies the exact moment Francis finds it unsatisfactory, and something in James’ chest caves in.

“This seems to be a rather common ailment, of late,” Francis says, picking at his words as delicately as James picks at his dinner. “Is there anything I can do to-”

“No, not at all, Francis,” James replies, with his best attempt at being blithe and daring, trying to recapture the simple ease they had found in the garden. “The autumn's arriving is all. Puts me quite out of sorts.” Francis stares at him for a few moments more, and James is sure he will nod, turn away, climb the stairs to the second floor _to their separate bedrooms_ and he will see nothing of him until the morning.

“I thought we were at the end of vanity,” Francis spits, and the words eat through the air between them like acid. “If you are unhappy here, if _I_ have given you cause to feel unwelcome, or otherwise wronged you, I pray you admit it to me now. It has been _months_ James, and I’ll not avoid this any longer.”

“Never - Francis you’ve done nothing wrong -”

“Then tell me why you’re acting this way!”

“It’s _me_!” James exclaims. “I’m -” _Wrong_. _I came back wrong._ The flood cannot hope to be stopped, the words have been building for months, for _years_ and they spring their banks, pour through the dams he thought were so well shored up and James can do nothing but look on in horror as they cascade from his mouth.“Half the time I feel as though I would rather have _died_ than come back the way I have, and the other half I just - I don't want - sometimes I want to turn it _off_. I want to stop the - the expectations, the responsibilities, the admirals begging me to take a new commission, the mothers hurling their daughters at me, the men and ladies who all expect stories from James Fitzjames - I _cannot be the man they expect me to be_.” He’s a loose thread in a finely embroidered collar, being pulled and pulled and pulled until there will be nothing left.

“Is this about Ross?” Francis asks, quietly. “I could not help but notice -”

“Not exactly.” Francis noticed. Of course he did. One more shame to burrow behind his heart. “More about how he - how I look at him and see the man I should be. Or the man I was.”

“No one compares the two of you.”

James does not know if Francis means himself and James Ross or the James Fitzjames who is lost, scrambles for a moment, decides on the latter.

“Whyever should they not? At least _he_ was worth _something_! He could command a room, take charge of a conversation, commit an outrageous act for the sheer spectacle of it.” _He couldn't keep anyone safe - he was naive and foolish about everything._ “I, however, have reduced my entire world down to this household and I cannot even take care of _you._ I see you drift around this house, I hear you toss and turn for hours in the night and there was a time, Francis - there was a time when I would have - would have to do naught but press a hand to your heart and listen to your breathing steady even as my own grew ragged.”

“James we aren’t - you don’t have to -”

“If I cannot be him _then what good am I?”_ He is breathing heavily, aware of how loud his gasps are. Francis may be able to feel his breath on his face. It must smell wretched, like all the rot that lived and lives within James is rising to the top, spilling out in ways he cannot stop. Yet if that is the case, Francis gives no indication. He merely directs them to the sofa, where he takes one of James’ trembling hands in both of his and sets the tangle down on James’ knee.

“I once challenged a biographer to catalogue your deeds,” he mutters, staring at their joined hands. “Do you remember that day?”

He does, he does, he remembered tearing out his heart with all his secrets, that miserable little thing he had tried so valiantly and so long to protect, heaved it at Francis with scarcely a warning. _This is me, the real me. I’ve ripped out all the fine stitching so you can see it for what it is._ Francis had looked at it, smiled at him, told him it was a fine sort of heart anyway.

 _Are we brothers, Francis?_ That’s what he had said. It is not all he had wanted to say.

“I do,” he says, small and wretched, tears pricking at the edges of his eyes.

“You were already extraordinary,” Francis continues. James is trying to listen, but the edge of Francis’ thumb is veering dangerously close to the sensitive skin on the inside of James’ wrist. He hears enough to huff a small, derisive sound which Francis, ever contrary, completely ignores. “You have only grown in my esteem, since.”

James shifts, unsure of where to put the praise Francis has so solemnly handed him. He wants it, he wants many things, but wanting and deserving are not the same. He has become well acquainted with their stark differences since their rescue.

What he _wants_ he does not often _deserve_.

“I do not feel as if I quite merit such an accolade,” James says. His voice is small and far away; he hardly sounds like a man closing the door on his thirties. He sounds like a terrified midshipman, cowering in his bunk and sick for want of home.

“An absurd pair we make, then, if we are both to be so overwhelmed by our state.”

“Francis?” A deep breath punctuates the silence, and when Francis speaks, his words are halting, unsure.

“When I see your face - whenever I am with you, I wonder how it is that I should be deserving of such a fortune.” Fortune. James wants to look into Francis’ eyes, see what expression he wears, but he will not ask more of fortune.

“I don’t understand.” James' eyes refuse to veer from their hands. Francis’ thumb has found his wrist, and the touch curls up his arm and stokes a fire somewhere in the base of his spine.

“You lived, and so did I. I should not want to exist in a world that does not have you in it.”

“Francis…”

“This person you think you have become - this other man you _think_ you left behind -”

“I _did_ ,” James shakes his head. “He is gone and left me... scattered. Like a coat that someone tore to pieces and sent fluttering on the wind.”

“Then you must employ your needle.”

James reflects on the woman and her quick and elegant stitches in the dim shadows of his earliest memories. Thread becoming something new. Francis makes it sound so simple, she made that transformative magic seem so simple.

“I’m a poor stitch. My hands shake.” They're shaking now, though not from their usual ailment.

“I can help, if you’d like,” Francis says, softly. “I’m told my stitching is passable.”

“By whom?”

“Jopson.”

“Ah, a veritable expert.”

They sit in silence for a few moments. James wonders how long he should allow the contact of their fingers before he pulls away, how long he can enjoy their closeness before he reveals too much of himself. _A bit longer, a bit longer, I should think._

“You are not alone in this,” Francis says, with a long sigh. “I am not who I was, either.” James opens his mouth to object, but Francis raises his hand. When James disregards this obvious signal and attempts to speak regardless, he finds Francis’ finger pressed to his lip and his breath catches at the contact. Speech is impossible under these conditions.

“We are none of us. Not me, not you, not James Ross. Should anyone today dare to tell me you don’t deserve to live - deserve the whole of the world on a string if you wished it - I’ll - well I’ll punch them in the face.”

“You have a fearsome fist, Captain Crozier. I should hate to be the person on the receiving end of it.” Francis looks at him with a twist in his lip, raises his hand to James’ face and tenderly presses the place where once there was a bruise, where Francis’ fist met James’ cheek in their first skin to skin contact since becoming moored in the ice. He wore the bruise for a fortnight, far too long even then, watched it turn blotched and yellow before finally fading.

“I am sorry to have burdened you with knowledge of it.”

“It is past - long past. I do not wish to think about it any longer.”

“What _is_ it that you wish, James?” _Too many things. Things that would take you from my side, would cause you to cast me out into the street, would -_

“I would stay here,” James says, to his own surprise.

“But for how long?”

 _Forever_.

“As long as - as long as -” James shuts his eyes. It is late, and his hand is warm and safe within the cradle of Francis’. The odd notion of being jealous of his own hand drifts across his mind until he leans forward, presses his face into Francis’ shoulder and feels those strong arms wrap around him. He wishes he could stay like this until the frayed threads of his soul manage to swirl themselves back together again. He wants to embroider _himself_ upon Francis’ heart, in stitches so fine and strong they could never be parted. He pulls back - perhaps to speak some of this aloud, or to apologize - but whatever he meant to say is utterly forgotten the moment he looks into Francis’ eyes. Even in his agitated state, he cannot mistake that look, not for all the guilt and recrimination that has burrowed under his skin. James himself wears it whenever he thinks Francis cannot see, when his first sits by the fire and grumbles over the paper, or smiles on a walk when he’s hit by a bracing wind, or looks fondly on at a letter from one of their old crew.

But if Francis looks at him like that it means -

It means -

When did the air become so thin?

Francis leans forward, and kisses him.

He conjured elaborate fantasies for how Francis would kiss him. _How else to keep busy through a long Arctic winter?_ With anger, at first, to shut him up, all teeth and bruised lips. Later with drunken fumblings and lust, clumsy, eager, too much tongue. With friendship, for an all to brief time, before that transformed to pity for the last wish of a dying man, a chaste peck on the forehead, a cheek, the back of a hand.

James never dared himself to dream that Francis might kiss him with love.

_He does. He does._

The instant he recovers from his shock James responds in kind, clinging to Francis’ coat, tilting his face to better the angle, allowing the kiss to deepen, for them to begin tentative explorations of the shape of the other’s lips. It is not until Francis cups his hands to James’ face and gently brushes away his tears that James realizes he is crying.

“No one can be this fortunate,” James breathes against his lips, before Francis can misinterpret his reaction. “I'm afraid this will -” he sweeps his hand over the room, indicates its disappearance “-at any moment, and I'll open my eyes and we will be - back there.” Francis purses his lips, brings James’ hand to his lips and kisses the knuckles.

“This is real,” he murmurs. “I am a selfish man, James, and I’ll not let the ice touch you again, not -” James silences him with another brush of his lips.

“We are a matched set, then,” James replies. “For if I had my way we would vanish from this city altogether and set up our home just - just the two of us, somewhere warm.” He can imagine it now - no one to perform for, no endless parade of well wishers, of mothers shoving their daughters at him, of staring into the mirror wondering what others will see when they look at him. Just Francis. Francis, who has already seen him at his worst.

Francis, who knows now all the deepest secrets of his heart.

Francis, for whom he does not have to _perform_.

“We can,” Francis replies, and why should he look like the dawn is breaking over a long Arctic night? “We can go - South, east, leave for the continent, if that is what you wish.”

“I would -” He nods fervently, lest Francis take any form of hesitation as a refusal. “Anywhere, Francis. Anywhere… anywhere where you are.” Francis’ fingers tighten around his own.

“We will make our inquires tomorrow.”

* * *

If a man can be lost, may he not also be found? Can a dead man find himself reborn in the eyes of another?

James has always imagined himself like embroidery, like a flower or a leaf stitched onto a pillow or a dressing gown - unnecessary, and who must apologize for its own existence by being breathtaking and beautiful. He has been unraveled by the ice.

But now, in the mornings before Francis awakes, he often considers how Francis sees him - Francis who (apparently, confoundedly) _needs_ him, clings to him in the night like James is a spar among a ship’s wreckage, and Francis a drowning man, like James is a sweater in the dead of an arctic night. Yet yarn is also a thread, is it not? It cannot be worked so delicately as the fine thread from his earliest memories, perhaps, but it would be a fool indeed to call yarn the deficient material. Yarn can be patterned, layered, keep a man warm throughout the cold day and even colder night. It does not shirk its duty when faced with stormy weather. A pretty bauble of silk thread can delight a child - a blanket knitted will keep him warm. Sometimes, when Francis wakes and looks at him as James never expected _anyone_ to look at him, James thinks he can catch a glimpse of the man that Francis sees. Still beautiful, but also useful, safe, a complicated cabling pattern in a much beloved gansey.

They move to the country, reducing the extent of their explorations to hikes through the heath, their discoveries to charming finds at the market, new recipes to attempt, interesting ways to draw a breathy moan from the other.

It isn’t perfect. He isn’t _fixed_. There are days when James stalks about the house, adrift, unsure of who he is and where he has gone and what he will be tomorrow.

But Francis knows. And James trusts Francis.

And it is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Come yell about cracking open the emotions of these cold boys over at [@soft-october-night](https://soft-october-night.tumblr.com/)


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